particle beam?
Posted: Mon Jul 13, 2009 2:23 am
The mention of particle beams in another thread sparked a different idea.
I'd imagine the normal method of creating a particle beam is to dump loads of power into an accelerator, which the polywell would make more practical.
Some of what I'm hearing indicates that the alphas come out on the cusps. This provides a limited surface area to harvest them--I'm thinking that with a polywell, you're getting 2+MeV alpha particles out without the need to accelerate them up to speed. Would it be reasonable to harvest these for use in a beam? Alphas from PB11 wouldn't be terribly practical in atmosphere if I recall some basic physics properly, but I'm sure the system could probably be used to run a different reaction, producing the desired particles.
Would something like that work?
I'd imagine the normal method of creating a particle beam is to dump loads of power into an accelerator, which the polywell would make more practical.
Some of what I'm hearing indicates that the alphas come out on the cusps. This provides a limited surface area to harvest them--I'm thinking that with a polywell, you're getting 2+MeV alpha particles out without the need to accelerate them up to speed. Would it be reasonable to harvest these for use in a beam? Alphas from PB11 wouldn't be terribly practical in atmosphere if I recall some basic physics properly, but I'm sure the system could probably be used to run a different reaction, producing the desired particles.
Would something like that work?